Organizations and enterprises often have an interest in controlling cost of various consumables used in the course of business. One common class of consumables are those used in printers. Such consumables may include, for example, ink, toner, paper, staples, binding materials, among others.
Cloud-based printing services have come into increasing use. In such a service, web-enabled printers are connected to a network such as the Internet and registered with the printing service. The printing service typically includes rendering services for different types of documents, and as such can allow documents to be sent from light-weight devices such as smart phones or PDAs that typically cannot internally render the document into print data.
However, these printing services are typically not established, operated, or controlled by the organization or enterprise, and thus the printing services may also be used by many users who are not part of the organization or enterprise. Due to these factors, among others, it is difficult for the organization or enterprise to determine or control the consumable usage of its printers which are connected to and registered with the cloud-based printing service.